Word: hefners
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WHEN HUGH HEFNER founded Playboy magazine in 1953, he did little to help foster the sexual revolution; instead, his radical publication helped stimulate the rise of consumerism while maintaining what was ultimately a "clean" sexual ethic. This is one of the more provocative arguments feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich puts forth in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, which offers a fresh approach to the battle of the sexes. Written with wit, style, and no small degree of social insight, this important book significantly challenges popular beliefs about the women's movement and the current anti...
...about herself and her would: she is merely Snider's sacrificial lovely. Snider does love her, but he also sees an exploitable innocence; she is a property that he can ride our of his world of cars and girls--into a world of faster cars and faster girls. Hugh Hefner (Played with den-mother benevolence by pajama-clad Cliff Robertson) is Snider's Buddha, and the Playboy Mansion his sensualist's nirvana. He impresses Dorothy with his tacky style; he gives her a real two-carat topaz; he escorts her to her senior prom in a ruffled sky-blue tuxedo...
...anti-capitalist argument, interpreting Stratten's misfortunes as an inevitable result of capitalist exploitation, would focus on the Disneyland nature of Hefner's Playboy empire (as Fosse does) and on the insatiable appetite of a capitalist society for junk food, junk movies--in short, junk values. It would also point an accusing finger at the American propensity for materializing and objectifying life; through, for example, the starmaking machinery in New York and Los Angeles, which manufactures individuals into cardboard cutouts and then expresses shock when they age, bleed...
...Hugh Hefner is distressed. He does not like his centerfolds to be married: it undermines their girl-next-door image. Besides, it is disruptive to the "family" atmosphere that he likes to believe pervades the mansion in Los Angeles. Hef surely has his self-delusions, but in this case he also has a point. Any would-be father figure might have his doubts about Dorothy Stratten's choice of a mate. Granted, it was Paul Snider who discovered her behind the Dairy Queen counter in Vancouver, B.C., sent the first crude nudes to Playboy's talent scouts...
...murder the one he loved (and kill himself as well). But the words pierce to the heart of the matter as the writer-director sees it. Everyone Dorothy Stratten meets wants to exploit her in some way. Yet in this peculiar moral universe, Fosse suggests, the differences between Hefner (played with slithery menace by Cliff Robertson), Snider and the upscale moviemaker (Roger Rees) who aspires to be her ultimate Pygmalion are more a matter of style than of principles...